On September 6, 2023, the United States military reportedly assisted the Somali government in an deadly counter-terrorism operation that killed five civilians. For many Americans, their immediate thought to hearing of this news is probably something along the lines of: I had no idea the US was militarily active in [...]
In a recent series of articles published in the Journal of World-Systems Research (Part I and Part II), I examine why, in this current period of crisis, the contradictions of capitalism and its constituting ideology of liberalism have paved the way for fascism’s return. Though [...]
The relationship between capitalism and racism is structural rather than merely historical. It is not just that capitalism emerged in an already-racialized context, and so developed in a racialized way. It is also that racism can be explained by its functional role in stabilizing capitalist class relations. This view has occasionally been described as "class reductionist." In our view, this does not itself amount to a fatal criticism, but it does associate our argument with others that we in fact reject.
Antitrust and labor reformers can serve as complementary components of a progressive coalition to take power from corporations and govern corporations and markets in the public interest.
Does the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the US signal the breakdown of past alliances between workers and intellectuals, and the emergence of new cross-class coalitions? Or have the worker-intellectual alliances that were integral to social-democratic movements in the past endured in some form? A recent study by Chad Alan Goldberg and Masoud Movahed provides some answers.
The government emphasizes fukugyō as a means of free choice and achieving good work-family balance. However, the reality of fukugyō is often far from the ideal picture painted by the government. Fukugyō workers typically experience low wages, employment insecurity, a lack of social protection, and limited opportunities for upward career mobility.
The practice of ridicule proved crucial to creating a culture of resistant solidarity among the workers. In the presence of this solidarity, workers dared to engage in more practical acts of resistance. These included manipulating the algorithms, or using gaps of control for illegal breaks. In some cases, workers even engaged in outright sabotage.
For Du Bois, capitalism and racism do not only impose on the souls but also the soils of Black folk. In a century defined by the intersecting crises of capitalism, racist oppression, and global ecological degradation, Du Bois’s theories that detail their relation and offer a program to reimagine society as an abolition democracy, serve as a prescient guide.
That striking image of US-Brazil labor solidarity is only one snapshot of a transnational union partnership which has proved to be long-lasting and institutional, yet adaptable. New political, social and legal convergences have brought the labor movements of these two countries closer together over the past decade, as both are now contending with challenges to their representativeness and social legitimacy in times of extreme political polarization and growing labor precarity.
Are nurses, teachers and analysts the wave of the future? Are their jobs, and others like them, less suitable to capitalism’s extract-and-monetize model and do they possibly prefigure post-capitalist regimes? Questions like these have transfixed macro social scientists since the mid-twentieth century. Every twenty years or so theorists hem [...]
![Hundreds of male and female Shirtwaist strikers march to City Hall. Placard says "Union Contract [illegible]".](https://marxistsociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/5279167755_cffac09144_o-669x272.jpg)
Research finding summaries